Garage Ventilation

Garage ventilation is something that is very easy to overlook but can have a big impact on your home’s overall indoor air quality. Let’s first look at what is happening in a typical garage and what contaminates are being produce. 

Automobiles

The biggest source of contamination in a garage is almost always going to be a car. While a gas-powered car will certainly produce larger amounts of contaminates in the form of carbon monoxide, electric cars also produce contaminates. Automobile contaminates include off gassing from tires, dirt and debris, fluid or oil leaks and so forth.

Storage

For many, the garage is a storage area for everything from a lawn mower to holiday decorations to paint to spare gasoline and the list goes on. Many of these items produce some unwanted contamination into the air.

Trash

A lot of homes store their trash cans in the garage. While the contaminates mostly are smells (that chicken container that has been sitting for three days in a hot garage), some can be a little more aggressive like oily rags, old cleaners, painting supplies and so forth.

Heat

In the summer months garages can get really hot. That heat can stay trapped in the garage and warm the entire home.

Now that we have identified what is happening in the garage, we need to talk about the types of garages. There are basically three different type of garages and all of them have varying ventilation needs.

Attached Garage with a Room Overtop (FROG)

This is a garage that is integrated in the design of the home. Some refer to them as FROG or Front Room Over Garage. Builder’s use this style to maximize space and add square footage. This building type requires the highest amount of garage ventilation. The reason being that contaminates from the garage can penetrate into the living spaces in multiple ways. Depending on the construction and the amount of contaminates building up in the garage, they can seep into the room above the garage through the floor. Hopefully the home was built with barriers in place to prevent this but unfortunately some are not or those barriers fail over time. A second way contaminates can enter the home is through the attached walls. As with the room above the garage, if not properly constructed, contaminates can seep through the walls. The third and most common way that contaminates can enter the home is through the connecting door. This happens each time the door is opened and a person walks into the home. The process is going to allow contaminates to come in with the air or brought in when people enter. Depending on how tight the door is sealed, this could also be a source where the contaminates are seeping into the home.

Standard Attached Garage

A standard attached garage is going to have all of the same possible points of contamination as the FROG just without the room overtop. While this has the potential to produce less infiltration into the home, there is still a need for garage ventilation.

Detached Garage

A detached garage is one that does not have any connection to the home’s main living areas and therefore will not be a direct source of contamination into the home. The contaminates that you need to be concerned with are only when occupying the space – especially if it is used as a workshop or a place that is occupied for extended times.

Now that we have identified the contaminates and the type of garages, why and how do we to ventilate them? Many argue that a garage is typically not as well sealed as the main living areas so there is significantly more natural ventilation than the rest of the home. An additional argument is that opening the garage door provides all the ventilation that you need. Both points are valid however the amount of contaminates that can build up in a garage may not be able to be properly ventilated through these means. Think about when you walk into the garage after it has been closed for a while. Is there a strong scent of gas, rubber, paint, chemicals and so on? Those are all the contaminates that are building up and are possibly seeping into your home (for attached garages) or you are breathing in when you are in the garage.

Having some type of exhaust fan system in place is the best solution for mitigating these contaminates as well as any heat buildup. A solution like the Air King EWF-180 is designed to vent contaminated air directly out of spaces like garages. If you don’t want a fan running continuously, adding a timer is an option. With a timer you can have the fan operating during the times of day where the most contamination buildup is occurring. While opening widows (if present) is helpful, it will not provide the airflow you need for proper garage ventilation. Having windows open in your garage could also be a security risk. To learn more about Air King’s ventilation solutions, visit airkinglimited.com.

5 Signs of Poor Ventilation In Your Home

Our homes are our sanctuaries and we want to keep them as healthy as possible so identifying signs of poor ventilation is a great place to start. Ventilation simply put is removing the “bad” air from inside the home and replacing it with fresh air. This can be done in a few different ways. Mechanical ventilation is the most common. This is where an exhaust fan is utilized to exhaust the stale/contaminated air out of the home. Other methods are considered natural ventilation where you rely on opening windows or doors to allow the fresh air to come in and push the stale air out. There are more nuances to these but the basics are either you are controlling the ventilation of the home through an exhaust fan or you are letting nature control it through openings in the home. Now that we have an understanding of ventilation let’s take a look at some of the signs your home is not being properly ventilated.

Mold or Mildew

The easiest place to look for this is in the bathrooms as that is where it will be most prevalent. If your bathroom is not properly ventilated, it won’t take long for the constant presence of moisture to create a mold and mildew issue.  This typically happens for one of 3 reasons:

1. A bathroom exhaust fan is not present. Without any way of mitigating moisture, it will be very difficult to control moisture build-up. We would highly recommend installing an exhaust fan.
2. The current exhaust fan is not being used properly or is not working. This could be either it doesn’t get turned on or is not run for a long enough time. For most bathrooms, the fan should run for at least 20 minutes after the shower has been used. A solution for both of these is to install a humidity sensor that will automatically sense the humidity level of the room and turn the fan on or off accordingly. If you are in the market for a new exhaust fan you can look for one that has this feature integrated into the fan. For existing exhaust fans, a wall switch (like the Air King DH55) can easily be added.
3. The current exhaust fan is not powerful enough for the room. In general, you will need at least 1 CFM (cubic feet per minute) of ventilation for one square foot of space. For instance, a 10-foot by 10-foot bathroom equals 100 square feet, requiring at least 100 CFM of ventilation. The challenge is that just because a fan says it delivers a certain amount of CFM, it might not. Factors such as how the fan was installed, how much ducting and many more factors can decrease the fan’s airflow. The solution might be to upgrade your fan to a higher airflow. If installing a new fan is not an option, running it longer is a work around. You can also consider a humidity switch as was discussed above.

Dust

This seems like a little bit of an odd one. All homes have dust – right? While that is true, let’s take a look at how dust accumulates. In order for dust to build-up it cannot be moving around. It has to settle in one place. If your home is being properly ventilated a good amount of the dust should be exiting the home. It will not be 100% but it should be noticeably less. Having an exhaust fan running continuously can help the build-up. National building codes now require a whole-house continuously running exhaust fan to be installed in a central location of the home. This is a great first step to having a properly ventilated home.

Musty Smell

Does your home smell musty, especially when you come back after being away for a few days. This is a tell-tale sign of poor ventilation. The smell is typically coming from a build-up of moisture somewhere in the home and is usually because fresh air is not getting into the home. As with the other signs, having properly operating exhaust fans – especially a whole house exhaust fan will greatly reduce moisture build-up and the musty smells that it produces.

Sickness

Does it seem like someone is always sick in the household? A contributing factor could be poor indoor air quality. If things like mold and mildew are present in the home and are not mitigated, they will cause a constant state of unhealthy air to be breathed in by all the inhabitants of the home which could lead to sickness. Poor ventilation can also contribute to illnesses being passed from one member of the household to another as well as prolonged illness. Have you heard the term “go out and get some fresh air”? A second best to that is making sure the air inside is fresh. While having a properly ventilated home is not going to protect you from ever being sick, it could greatly increase your health by reducing the factors that lead to you being sick. If you are in a season where it seems like someone is always sick, try looking at your home’s ventilation and make adjustments to increase the amount of ventilation and especially the amount of fresh air coming into the home.

Hot or Cold Rooms

Here is another item that most people would not consider as part of signs of poor ventilation but do you have areas of your home that are either too cold or too hot? While there are multiple factors that could contribute to that – poor insulation, HVAC system issues, poorly installed windows and so forth, a hidden item might be ventilation. How ventilation plays into this is by making sure there is a good airflow through the home. This allows the conditioned air to be properly distributed through throughout the home. Without airflow your HVAC system might be pumping cool air (during the summer month) into the house but without good room to room airflow, some rooms will not be cooled as well as others. A simple way to demonstrate or test this is to go to the room furthest away from your HVAC system on a hot day where the air conditioner is running. Close the door for a little while and see what happens to the temperature of the room. It will probably increase compared to the rest of the home. This happens because the cooler air from the other rooms is not able to be circulated as it needs to be. While in theory each room should be able to be cooled (or heated in the winter) on its own – in reality, it just doesn’t happen that way and the home relies on the air being circulated.

Is your home showing signs of poor ventilation? We hope that this article can help you identify and correct them. Air King offers a full line of ventilation solutions that can help the overall indoor air quality of your home. To learn more about Air King exhaust fans and fresh air intake, visit airkinglimited.com.

When considering the overall indoor air quality of your home, many people will overlook laundry room ventilation. For the most part homes will have ventilation fans in the kitchen and bathrooms – which is a good thing, the laundry room however is almost always overlooked. Let take a look at components in the laundry room.

In homes that have a dedicated laundry room, they are typically isolated without any windows and very poor natural ventilation. The washing machine itself might not be a direct source of contamination but the laundry detergent and fabric softener are. For the most part these cleaners are stored in the same room and without ventilation, they can decrease the indoor air quality of the room causing you to breath them in while doing the laundry. A second component of the washer is it produces wet clothing. While most of the time this is going to be transferred to the dryer, it will increase the humidity level of the room. Without proper ventilation that extra humidity can lead to mildew or mold. The other major appliance in the room is the dryer. Whether you have a gas or electric dryer will have different impacts on the air quality. In a perfect world any contaminates from the dryer will be exhausted out the ducting from the dryer. Unfortunately, most systems are not perfect and a least a little bit of contaminates in the form of gas, lint and so forth are going to enter the room. Having proper laundry room ventilation will greatly reduce the risks to you.

We have covered the major appliances but in a good number of laundry rooms there are also some not so thought about items like a sink. Many times, the laundry room utility sink is used to dispose of items that you wouldn’t want to use the kitchen sink for. These can include paint clean-up, rags used for cleaning and other items that could contain chemicals that are being released into the room during the cleaning process. The laundry room can also be a storage place for household cleaners, bug sprays and so forth. All of these need to be ventilated out of the home.

Laundry room ventilation is something that definitely needs more attention given to it. The good news is that in general, a very small and inexpensive exhaust fan will be more than enough to properly ventilate the room and provide very good indoor air quality. To view Air King’s line of exhaust fans, visit airkinglimited.com.